September 24 – San Francisco

Morgan Marquis-Boire at the Strange Loop Conference, t2’15 conference, and Black Hat Executive Summit.

The Citizen Lab is one of the winners of the 2015 Pioneer Award, awarded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

A “secret network” launched by the Canadian federal government last year, costing millions of dollars to taxpayers, came under close scrutiny following a suspected hack. Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christoper Parsons explains the possibilities behind the leaking of the document.

At the  2015 USENIX Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) workshop, held in Washington DC on August 10, Citizen Lab and collaborators present three papers.

The papers include: investigation of censorship and surveillance on China’s most popular social video platforms, an updated analysis of China’s Great Canon, and examination of securing cookie-based identifiers from passive surveillance.

The Media Democracy Fund, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, selected Cyber Stewards Network partners Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC) and Derechos Digitales as recipients of the Quantified Society Grants.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), a government agency responsible for the establishment and operation of telecommunications in the country, ordered the shutdown of BlackBerry’s encrypted communication services.

Hacking Team, a Milan-based developer of “offensive security” technology that markets its products to governments and law enforcement agencies around the world, was significantly compromised when hackers leaked nearly 400 GB of its internal data, including emails, client files, and financial documents. The leak was announced via Hacking Team’s own compromised Twitter account, and the content made publicly available. Among other things, the leaked documents confirmed our findings that the company sells its software to several governments with repressive human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and more.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke at the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), joining a panel discussion on “The Global Campaign Against Democratic Norms.”

Citizen Lab’s Research Fellow John Scott-Railton spoke to Politico regarding the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of hackers in support of Bashar Al-Assad’s government. An article by Business Insider also featured Citizen Lab research into ISIS malware attacks.